1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to front-of-screen processing. More particularly, it relates to copying and pasting of numerics, text or code using a two tier clipboard or buffer.
2. Background Art
It is known in the art to provide a clipboard or buffer into which material such as display data selected by a user is copied for subsequent pasting into another area of the display. Referring to FIG. 1, step 10, this selection is typically done by blocking (highlighting) the material or portion to be deleted or copied. In step 12, the material (numeric, text, code, etc.) moved to the clipboard may be removed from its original location (a delete operation) or left (a copy operation). In step 14, the user selects an insertion point, typically by positioning a cursor, and in step 16 pastes the clipboard content at the insertion point.
It happens that the user will sometimes block less display data than is desired or syntactically correct. For example, a user may block only a portion of a telephone number, missing one or more digits in the process. Similarly, a programmer may block, or highlight, a section of source code to paste into another section of the code and in so doing miss a portion of the code structure required for correct syntax.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved system and method for copying material from one display location to a second location.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for assuring that partially blocked data is copied in its entirety.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for assuring that syntactically complete data is copied for a partially selected section of data.